The domain of clinimetrics is concerned with problems of measurement of patients' symptoms and for other distinctively clinical phenomena that are usually dismissed as artful "soft data" and excluded from rigorous analytic attention during the planning or evaluation of diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic procedures. To allow these clinical phenomena to regain their vital humanistic and scientific importance amid the contributions and distractions of modern technology, improvements are needed for two fundamental aspects of the measurement process: the "mensuration" by which observed phenomena are converted into items of primary data; and the "quantification" by which primary data are arranged, enumerated, and analyzed. The activities proposed here are aimed at both these improvements. The mensuration process can be improved with suitable attention to development of the rating scales, specific criteria, and methods of validation that can be employed to "harden" soft data. The quantification process can be improved by distinguishing the different scienfific roles of clinical information, by assembling appropriate collections of data for each of the diverse roles, and by developing better methods for storing and analyzing the collected data. The early phases of the proposed clinimetric activities are devoted to educational instruction for potential or incipient investigators; to augmentation of previous clinimetric research; to development of an organized compendium of clinical indexes and scales; and to critical analysis and improvement of the methods used in clinimetric procedures. Subsequent developments will begin from work done by the recipients of the clinimetric instruction, and from challenges and opportunities that arise during the initial activities.